State Police still struggling with Detroit rape kit backlog

Michigan State Police say it will take millions of dollars to process thousands of rape kits found in an abandoned Detroit crime lab.

John Collins is State Police Director of Forensic Science. He says Michigan State University researchers are helping to identify the kits but the procedure takes time and money:

“What we hope to have eventually is some federal support to help us supply resources to test as many of these kits as possible, and to assist with the prosecutions that we think will come later on down the road,” said Collins.

Collins says about a thousand rape kits will be analyzed for DNA in the next year. The results will be submitted to a national database to look for matches from other cases.

That leaves a backlog of another 10,000 kits .

The Detroit Police crime lab was shut down in 2008 after it was learned that firearms cases had been improperly handled.